The Economist Intelligence Unit has released an index of democracies [PDF] in which it ranks full democracies, flawed democracies, “hybrid systems” and authoritarian regimes. Egypt and Morocco are both at the same rank (115) in the last category — here’s Moroccan blogger Larbi‘s take on it — while the US, UK, France or Japan don’t even make it to the top 10 or top 15.
As a Moroccan who lives in Egypt, I’m often interested in comparing the two countries. I am generally speaking more optimistic about Morocco than I am about Egypt, but then again I am also harsher on Morocco because I don’t think it can afford not to move forward. Politically, it is a much more unstable place than Egypt and some of the social problems there are much more acute than those here. My overall impression, though, is that Morocco would deserve to be further up ahead than Egypt if it wasn’t for the fact that King Muhammad VI continues to retain political, constitutional, moral and economic power over Moroccans than Hosni Mubarak could only dream of.
Very interesting.
A few things that are striking about the methodology: one, the odd inclusion of protection of private property as one of the indicators of levels of democracy – this is not a standard indicator at all and they don’t make a case for including it; two, the rather quaint and equally unexplained inclusion of “political culture” variables like cohesive social values and attitudes towards democracy – sounds like someone read some Almond and Verba back in the 1960s, and continues to follow that circular (and repudiated) logic – they really should have chosen more empirical indicators to measure the entrenchment of democracy as the “only game in town.”
Anyone else suprised that Palestine is ranked as more democratic than Lebanon? I’d have thought they’d rate pretty low on the scale for control of elected institutions over actual policymaking.
And note that Egypt ranks lower than even Afghanistan on civil liberties.
Good work, New NDP Generation.
You can also find a text about the ranks of Tunisia and some graphs -arab coutry overall score, democracy across the regions, etc.-http://www.kitab.nl/2006/11/25/la-tunisie-135e-dans-lindex-de-la-democratie/“ rel=”nofollow”>here
I would like to know how Egypt scored 6.88 out of ten in the category political culture. The same score as Belgium, by the way.
Knowing a little bit about Belgian politics, I’m barely surprised!